Wednesday, December 12, 2018

HENRY LOUIS GATES, Jr.: Well, how did the black power movement relate itself to the Civil Rights movement? Was it a coda? Was it an aftereffect? Was it the next step? Was it the real revolution, or not the revolution?

JULIAN BOND: It promised to be the next step, but I don't think it ever realized that promise. A section of the movement became more nationalistic, pulling on this long stream of nationalism that's ever-present in black America, and schisms between black and white workers developed. Whites were expelled. The movement lost its interracial nature. It lost its larger support in the larger community. They were harmful to the movement. And while they didn't kill it, they certainly slowed it down.

Polite society seemed not to give a damn that it had become easier to get into Harvard or Cambridge if you were black than if you were poor. They deliberately ignored that identity politics can be as divisive as apartheid if allowed to act as a lever for overlooking class conflict.

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Intersectionality: A Marxist Critique | Black Agenda Report: Although intersectionality can usefully describe the effects of multiple oppressions, I propose, it does not offer an adequate explanatory framework for addressing the root causes of social inequality in the capitalist socioeconomic system. In fact, intersectionality can pose a barrier when one begins to ask other kinds of questions about the reasons for inequality—that is, when one moves past the discourse of “rights” and institutional policy, which presuppose the existence of social relations based upon the private ownership of the means of production and the exploitation of labor.

Saturday, December 8, 2018

Bell tries to defend choosing to praise an anti-semite, but the defense does not ring true. No one is obliged to apologize for anything another person of the same race said, but anyone who praises an antisemite is obliged to explain why or accept being seen as another antisemite.

Adolph Reed was quite happy to criticize Farrakhan, as a little googling will show.